Yeah, sorted now, I have 4.70 installed correctly. My other problem remains though. The strange thing is, I have the burner and a DVD drive on the same IDE channel, with the burner as master. I used Neros CPU utilisation test and while it shows the DVD uses around 15% utilisation at 8x, which is about right, the burner goes to 100% at the same speed. I notice it's doing this while burning as well; the mouse cursor is jumpy, etc. Considering I haven't installed anything new lately, this has got me stumped.

Well, I seem to have fixed it (touch wood!) I downloaded the IDE miniport driver from here: ***********.viaarena.com/?PageID=66 and it's now burning at the correct speed; also, it's burning whilst I'm writing this with no slowdown or jerkiness......Via chipsets eh: dontcha just love 'em?
Thanks for your help, Slyp

strangely ...I had a small reoccurence of my initial problem of the cd rom vanishing in windows on my brand new athlon xp system!!!! I hope this was just a one offf....or im gonna chuck my tdk cylone out the darn window!!!...lol